52 films to light up your life

The most fun thing I did during my recent Mumbai trip was an informal little group conversation for Outlook magazine. Satish Padmanabhan got a few of us to participate in a list-making exercise that was utterly whimsical, self-indulgent, even random (I can’t emphasise this enough). Each of us - Anupama Chopra, Sriram Raghavan and Srinivas Bhashyam were the others - picked 20 films we were passionate about (while agreeing that our lists would be very different if we made them an hour or even 10 minutes later), and then got together and came up with “52 Films to Light up Your Life”. Here is a part-transcript of our conversation.

Did I say this was self-indulgent and random? Yes - to give you an idea how random, our choice of the 52nd film came down to Kanti Shah’s Gunda and... a little old movie called Citizen Kane. Also, we were short on time - the Gossip hall, where we had the talk, needed to be made available for a 12.15 show - and had to rush through some of our choices. So please take all this with a vat of salt; enjoy the journey, forget about the destination, etc. READ!

P.S. there are a few small errors in the transcript, and some condensing of things that were said, so we all sound demented at times.

P.P.S. Given that this wasn’t mean to be a canonical list, I felt we ended up with too many obvious/canonical choices among the Indian films - Sholay, Deewaar, Nayakan, Satya etc. Can’t be helped.

Also: when I submitted my initial list of 20, I included a couple of “alternates” for nearly all my choices - e.g. while listing Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne as my Ray choice, I had Devi and Jana Aranya in parentheses. Neat way of expanding a Top 20 list into a Top 50/60...

Angry captive goddesses in Madhureeta Anand's Kajarya

[From my Mint Lounge column]

I haven’t watched Pan Nalin's Angry Indian Goddesses yet, but the other day I caught a remarkable, under-discussed film that also has a wrathful “goddess” at its heart. She isn’t just angry though, she is distraught and foul-mouthed and usually in an afeem-fuelled haze of self-loathing. She is the title character of Madhureeta Anand’s Kajarya, a village woman who is saddled with the task of getting rid of the community’s unwanted girl-babies.

Fifty-five years ago, Satyajit Ray’s Devi gave us an indelible visual representation of how patriarchy can simultaneously put women on a pedestal and enslave them: the story centred on young Dayamoyee (played by the 15-year-old Sharmila Tagore) whose life is altered when her father-in-law dreams that she is the Mother Goddess incarnate. In no time, she goes from being a normal girl, playing with her little nephew, to becoming an object of veneration, a living idol effectively imprisoned in the prayer room and brought out for darshan when people come asking for favours and miracles.

Much like Devi, Kajarya begins with goddess images – a clay statue, a painting – that are made to look sinister both by how they are framed and by the given context. We see that the village is dominated by men: most of the children seem to be boys; women are largely invisible; the local police chief has a lady assistant who banters with him, but she seems the exception that proves the rule. And then we meet the flesh-and-blood goddess, Kajarya (a mesmerizing performance by Meenu Hooda), who is a puppet in the hands of her “devotees”. “Jai Ma Kali” these men shout in a frenzy, even as they perpetuate their dominance over women.

Into this rustic setting trips a privileged young journalist from the city named Meera (Ridhima Sud, who played the wealthy ingénue in a very different sort of film, Dil Dhadakne Do, earlier this year). She looks and behaves like a card-carrying citizen of the modern world, she speaks Hindi with an accent and is a misfit in the village, but as the narrative progresses our view of her changes too; we become aware of her vulnerabilities and compulsions, some of which she doesn’t face up to herself. She is no stranger to enslavement and objectification, and she has her own form of nasha to help her cope.

There have been some notable films recently about female-infanticide and the related theme of how a society treats its women in various contexts. Take Anup Singh’s beautifully shot and performed Qissa: Tale of a Lonely Ghost, in which a girl-child is murdered not literally but symbolically (her father, despairing for a male heir, not only raises her as a boy but tells the world she IS a boy and comes to believe this himself). Or Nila Madhab Panda’s layered Jalpari: The Desert Mermaid, in which a city-bred girl travels with her dad to the village of his childhood, a place where both women and water – two sources of nourishment that are linked by this fable-like story – are now scarce. That film had a shadowy “daayan” who strikes fear in people’s hearts but who turns out to be an unfairly maligned outcaste. In Kajarya, things are a little more complicated: the “witch” really is a murderer, even if she has been victimized and manipulated along the way.

The divide between city and village, modernity and tradition, is central to Anand’s film, as the story moves between the spaces occupied by its two protagonists. But are these spaces really so different? In one scene, a high-society Delhi woman says that the villagers should use technology to pre-determine a foetus’s sex, instead of killing it after it has been born (“so barbaric”). In another, Meera tells her boyfriend in a disgusted tone about how a group of village men had playing-cards with photos of scantily clad women on them – “you could barely make out the faces, it was just bodies” – and as she speaks, we see a shot of her body (with her face outside the frame) from the boyfriend’s perspective. He then comments on her short dress, saying “Are you going to office dressed like that, or a disco?”

Some of these scenes may feel a little pedantic – perhaps this is inevitable in a “message movie” that combines fictional narrative with documentary – but Kajarya’s most powerful moments transcend message-mongering. They include a climactic confrontation where two women sit in a room, facing each other as antagonists. One of them is the interrogator, but soon the equations shift; it is the other woman who starts asking the hard questions, while the person who was initially in a position of power is forced to admit “Mere haath mein kuch nahin tha”. Here they sit, two goddesses in shackles, all too aware of how they are perceived and represented in male-dominated arenas.

[Related posts here: Qissa, Jalpari, Devi]

Updates, photos: discussing Hrishi-da in Kolkata and Mumbai

For anyone interested, here are a couple of updates about recent events involving the Hrishikesh Mukherjee book. (I realised I have been putting a lot of those updates on Facebook, but not here, since the blog is mainly a house for my published work now.)

1) I had a very good time in Kolkata last month, discussing the book and Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s work at an Author’s Afternoon session at the Taj Bengal. The audience was small but very warm and engaged, and I got to sign a few dozen books - many of them for libraries associated with the Prabha Khaitan Foundation, which organises these sessions. (Am very grateful to Mita Kapur and Siyahi for the invite.)

The best thing by far was a wonderful bit of serendipity involving my friend Rajorshi Chakraborti, with whom I had first discussed the idea of co-editing an anthology about Hrishi-da many years ago. When I agreed to the dates for the Author’s Afternoon, I didn’t know Raj was going to be visiting Kolkata at the same time; when I found out, I asked if he would do the discussion with me. Not only did he say yes, he did a stunning job: time flew by as we spoke about various aspects of HM’s work, from naatak and leela to his use of actors, reliving some of the things we had first spoken about 6 or 7 years ago, and adding new points.

Very rarely - even at carefully planned sessions at official book launches or big lit-fests - does one get to have such a stimulating conversation with someone who cares about a subject and who has read a book closely enough to ask lots of precise, pertinent questions. This was a special evening. Some photos below:

 

With Shankha Shuvro Bhaduri Chattopadhyay, who did this super sketch while our talk was on

Most of these signings were accompanied by very nice little conversations

2)  And some pics from the Times lit-fest session about “Hrishi-da’s Heroines” at Mehboob Studio, Mumbai, on December 4. With Pragya Tiwari (who moderated the talk) and Jaya Bachchan. As often happens in these situations, there was last-minute suspense about whether Mrs Bachchan would show up, and Pragya and I were a bit concerned - not because we weren’t ready to do a two-person discussion (we have spoken a great deal about HM and his work) but because the large crowd was clearly expecting to see JB. Anyway, it went off well in the end: Jaya-ji didn’t say anything spectacularly interesting (she started warming up towards the end, but we were running out of time), but she was gracious and eloquent. The video of the session is here.

My dad was Darth Vader: a Star Wars confession

[Here's a piece I did for Mint Lounge's special on Star Wars]

If you’re a ten-year-old encountering a sword-and-sorcery epic, it is natural enough to root for the young hero whose journey from innocence to peril to self-realization lies at the story’s heart. But the only time I really identified with Luke Skywalker was when the poor thing discovered that his daddy was a monster in a black mask.

And that moment, as any Star Wars buff knows, came nearly two-thirds of the way through the original trilogy, in the famous, frisson-producing climax of The Empire Strikes Back.

“You killed my father!”

“No. I AM your father.”

Followed by Luke’s scream of anguish (a part of him knew the truth already, he just wasn’t letting himself believe it) and his refusal to clasp Pater Vader’s outstretched hand, choosing a bottomless abyss instead.

(He survives, of course. He has to save himself and win redemption for his dad. And he will do this, since he is the hero and this is a fantasy.)

Before that scene, I hadn’t been particularly interested in Luke, who was played by the likable but bland Mark Hamill. The other male lead, Harrison Ford’s Han Solo, was more personable; besides, by the mid-1980s when I first saw the trilogy (at one go), Ford was a big star and this affected one’s perceptions of the characters. But then, it didn’t take Indiana Jones to make Hamill look dull. Chewbacca and Jabba the Hutt had more personality than Luke too. So did C-3PO. Even the light sabres, arguably. Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan had personality AND gravitas. And there was Master Yoda – cute was he, and funny spoke he.

(Of course, all these ideas about gravitas and heroism came before one was exposed to the frat-boy jokes about the characters’ names. “Hand solo? Snigger.” “Obi-Wan Kenobi has ‘I wank’ in the middle of it. Hehhehheh.”)

So, young Skywalker was a cipher amidst many colourful characters. But those words – “I am your father” – and Luke’s response to them: how completely they turned things around, how much they resonated. They still swim in my head alongside other lines that belong to the same galactic system: “Mera baap chor hai”, “Mere paas ma hai”, all part of a childhood mythology where real life always seemed to be mashed up with popular cinema.

Because by age 10, I had some experience of what it was like to have a black-helmeted monster as a dad. My mother and I had recently left my father’s house, escaped a life of alcohol-fuelled violence. I knew she was a lot cooler than Nirupa Roy, but I didn’t think my dad was as cool as Darth Vader – he was a little scarier though.

You’re thinking – sure, it’s okay to feel that sort of connect with a cheesy fantasy film as a child, but people grow up and find echoes in more grown-up things: “serious” films, “serious” books. And yes, I did gravitate towards that kind of art as I got older. But the Star Wars influence remained, in a little box in a corner of my head that also contained the dramatic tropes of mainstream Hindi films and the visceral immediacy of low-budget Hollywood horror. These things may have lain dormant for a while, especially during the years when I was immersed in world cinema and high literature, but they were there all right, and I would return to them for emotional nourishment as well as meaning.

So it was that when watching the original trilogy again, sometime in my twenties, and on the big screen (this was a rerelease to celebrate the onset of the new, “prequel trilogy” in 1999), I was just as deeply sucked into the Luke-Darth Vader narrative as I had been before. And this time I found myself stirred by the eerie nightmare scene that takes place midway through The Empire Strikes Back, before the big reveal: Luke decapitates Vader during a duel… only to find his own face beneath the cold black mask.

Hamill was still an average actor, but by this point I was projecting my own feelings on him, and I felt I understood the great fear in Luke’s mind. I had recently begun to note aspects of my personality that were dangerously close to my father’s: a short temper, a continual sense of persecution, a tendency towards crippling melancholia and self-righteousness. And I was realising how important it was to not let those qualities become too dominant, how important it was not to turn into my dad.

Years later, reading Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom, I would identify with Pinto’s fear of being laid low by his genetic heritage and becoming like his schizophrenic mother one day. But long before I read that fine book, a lightsabre duel had awakened similar thoughts; I had been acquainted – through life and through Star Wars – with the cynical possibility that parents can be most useful as cautionary models for what not to be.

 (And now the internet is awash with rumours that the big twist in the new film is that Luke Skywalker – now an old man – has finally crossed over to the Dark Side himself. Please, for Yoda’s sake, no.)

This connection with the Star Wars narrative is one of many times, in my career as a pop-culture consumer, when something massy, even pulpy, became a route to self-understanding. Which is one reason why I dislike the kneejerk snobbery often directed at mainstream Hindi cinema. And why, despite being a big fan of Pauline Kael’s writing, I have always been less than impressed by her famous distinction between Art and Great Trash, with its implication that films belonging to the latter category can be enormous fun, terrific entertainment, but you must never – no! no! no!, said in a headmistress’s voice – make the mistake of taking them too seriously. Those of us who “get” popular cinema, understand how it can provide a catalyst for our deepest and most primal feelings, wouldn’t ever patronize it in such terms.

Anyway, the years rolled by, I continued growing up (or not) and then came 2005 and the release of Revenge of the Sith – billed as the darkest film in the prequel-trilogy, the one that would show the transformation of Luke’s dad Anakin from Jedi hero to Sith Lord. Watching it, I was riveted again by the elements of Shakespearean tragedy, the operatic final scenes, the striking intercutting shots where we see the birth of the twins who will grow up to be Luke and Leia (the “new hopes”, creating a bridge to the first film, which we had already watched decades earlier), but where we also see a ghastly rebirth, the wounded Anakin being locked into the black suit that will become his new identity.

Most of all, there was the scene where Darth Vader, learning that his wife Padme is dead, bursts out of his shackles, lurches about like the Frankenstein monster, and growls “Nooooo!!!!” in the best style of the “Nahhiiinnn!” in old Hindi movies.

Watching that scene, a part of me may have wished that my own father had had something of a similar reaction when my mom and I moved out; that in a rare moment of clarity and self-awareness, he may have understood what he had lost, and grieved for it.

But probably not. Real life isn’t like cheesy films. At least, not all of the time.

Just be yourself: Dharmendra in Guddi, and other reflections

[Did this for Mint Lounge]

Dharmendra turns 80 on December 8. This can be hard to believe if the image in your head is of the pranksters he played in two very different types of films released forty years ago: the charade-orchestrating Professor Parimal Tripathi, confounding people in his “vaahan-chaalak” guise in Chupke Chupke, and the high-spirited rogue Veeru in Sholay – still, for my money, one of Hindi cinema’s most underappreciated lead performances (weird though it is to suggest that anything about Sholay might be underappreciated!). Or even if you’re thinking of the quiet leading man in black-and-white classics made by Bimal Roy and Asit Sen in the 1960s.

Coincidentally, a few weeks ago I helped organise a public screening of the 1971 Guddi, in which Dharmendra played himself. And around the time this column is published, I will be speaking with Jaya Bachchan at a panel discussion about women in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s cinema. One of those women – in this case, girl – was the character Bachchan (née Bhaduri) played in Guddi: the star-struck Kusum, who must be “cured” of her Dharmendra obsession, and who gets to meet her hero during a visit to Bombay’s film studios. Gamely, at the request of Kusum’s family, Dharmendra then participates in his own demythologizing, undercutting the glamour of the movie world, acquainting her with behind-the-scenes realities.

But even so, the film ends with the words “Jai Dharmendra!” – an exclamation by Kusum’s relieved uncle. The star does turn out to be the hero and saviour after all.

“Can an actor playing herself on screen escape the charge of narcissism inherent to the situation?” Maithili Rao asks in her new book Smita Patil: A Brief Incandescence. The question arises in the context of Patil’s role in Mrinal Sen’s Akaler Sandhane (1980), but it made me think about two producer-directors who played themselves onscreen: the legendary Cecil B DeMille in Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Wes Craven – best known for helming the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise – in the 1994 metafilm Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Watch those performances: even though the scripts don’t require either DeMille or Craven to be unqualifiedly nice (for instance, DeMille has to be firm, even harsh, with the film’s delusional protagonist Norma Desmond), they never lose their beatific expressions; they play Themselves with the reverence another actor might have brought to the part of Mother Teresa.

At the other extreme is self-parody. John Malkovich ostensibly plays himself in Being John Malkovich (1999), but such is the wacky nature of this film (the plot centres on an office-building portal that sucks you straight into the actor’s mind!) that a viewer can’t take anything at face value. Instead, if you’re familiar with the Malkovich persona – the effete preciosity one saw in earlier films like Dangerous Liaisons – you’re likely to recognize the little inside jokes in scenes like the one where he stays polite when confronted by an intolerable fan who goes on about the “retarded” character he had once played.

Eventually, Malkovich enters the portal himself: even John Malkovich wants to know what it feels like to be inside John Malkovich’s head! How close is this to the possibility that the Dharmendra of Guddi indulges Kusum’s family because he wants to understand the nature of his fandom – to look at himself through someone else’s eyes?

Even when narcissism or irony are not involved, the nature of cinema is such that any actor playing “himself” is always – to some degree or the other – playing a part or a construct. This doesn’t necessarily mean being dishonest or misleading the viewer, it can simply mean emphasizing or exaggerating an aspect of your personality, to suit the film’s purpose. When Aamir Khan, who has been much in the news lately for his plain-speaking, appeared in a cameo as himself in Zoya Akhtar’s marvelous Luck by Chance (2009), the scene threw in a wink at Aamir’s real-life reputation for perfectionism (which sometimes goes hand in hand with a reputation for being a control-freak): after he has shot a scene with the aspiring actress Sona (Konkona Sen Sharma), we see Aamir looking at the rushes with the director and muttering, “See, I almost got her name wrong in that line – you can see me hesitating for a fraction of a second.”

Like I said, though, the line between reality and projection isn’t always clear. When I first watched Guddi and saw Dharmendra going “aw-shucks, I’m just a sweet little Jat boy who happened to stumble into the big bad filmi world”, I was cynical: this had to be an exercise in image-building. But I felt a little differently early one morning last summer when I got my own tiny Guddi moment. The phone rang, and it was the man himself, sounding hesitant and avuncular; the call was a courtesy response to an email I had sent him about a possible interview. Our conversation was short, but he was every bit as sweet to me as he had been to Kusum in a fictional narrative 45 years earlier. I can’t get over how bashful the voice got when I said I loved his work in Satyakam, how close it was to the movie-studio scene in Guddi where Dharmendra, embarrassed by the intensity of Kusum’s fandom, sidles away from her like a coy heroine.

[A related piece here: the Amitabh cameos. And an earlier post about Dharmendra is here]

Identity crisis: on Michel Bussi's After the Crash

[Did this short review for Mint Lounge]

The French thriller Un Avion sans Elle, now translated into English as After the Crash, comes with a blaze of publicity reminiscent of that attending Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and the work of the Japanese author Keigo Higashino (The Devotion of Suspect X, Salvation of a Saint) – the promise of a stirring, twist-in-the-tail story combined with sociological or psychological commentary. And to a degree, this is the case. You feel a pleasing chill when, in the opening pages of Michel Bussi’s novel, a detective, about to commit suicide because he has been unable to solve a confounding mystery for 18 years, realizes that the solution has been staring at him from the front page of an old newspaper.

The book then adopts a cross-cutting narrative. We are made privy to the detective’s journal account of the case that preoccupied him for so long, as well as the present-day trials of a young man named Marc and the girl he loves, Lylie, whose identity is at the heart of the mystery. Lylie, now 18 (the story is set in 1998), was the sole survivor of a plane crash as a three-month-old baby, and was subsequently claimed by two different families – one very wealthy, the other eking out a livelihood by selling sausages from a van. A court judgement – based mainly on circumstantial evidence – was reached, but both families knew in their hearts that there was no foolproof way of verifying the baby’s origin, and this uncertainty affected many lives over the years.

If the only question on your mind is “Is this a gripping thriller?”, stop reading this review now and just order the book. I was swept along for the most part, and had to stop myself from jumping ahead a few dozen pages to see how it would end. But as a nitpicking critic, I also want to list my areas of dissatisfaction. The first was simply that midway through, I had guessed part of the solution: not all the details, but the broad set-up. (Without giving much away, it has a touch of old-world melodrama, which makes me wonder if it came easily to me because I grew up with mainstream Hindi cinema.) And while it can be good for the ego to feel like you’re a step or two ahead of the characters, it can also hinder your enjoyment of a breakneck thriller, especially when the author stretches things out and provides two or three cliffhangers where one would have sufficed; the revelations involving DNA test results made me especially impatient and felt more Dan Brownish than was necessary.

The other problem was that I wished we had learnt a little more about the inner conflicts of Lylie and her two sets of “grandparents”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Bussi should have compromised on his principal task – keeping the reader’s hair on edge – by getting self-consciously solemn or introspective. I just felt that once he had this particular premise in place – with its potential for examining the nature-nurture question, the class divide and the workings of guilt and regret, among other things – he could have done a little more with it. “We all hang on desperately to life even when there’s no hope left,” one character says to another near the end. I wish the relevance of this thought – and a few others – to this story had been addressed more directly.

Otherwise, Bussi does a fine job of throwing in red herrings – in making us think, for instance, that the secret of Lylie’s identity is so important that people might be murdered for it. Or at creating the impression that there might be more to the whole thing than meets the eye: could the plane crash have been part of a terrorist plot directed at a big business family? Might the Lylie story be further complicated by infidelities within her biological family? There are wry – sometimes overdone – touches of meta-commentary in the narrative (Marc wonders exasperatedly why the detective couldn’t simply have set down the facts of the case instead of writing his journal in the style of a potboiler). And, in what I thought was a hat-tip to Stieg Larsson’s immensely popular creation Lisbeth Salander, there is also a petulant, foul-mouthed woman-child named Malvina who starts off as Marc’s adversary, then becomes a reluctant travel companion. She is only a supporting character here, but don’t be too surprised if she returns in a future Bussi novel.

Darkness in pictures

[My latest Forbes Life column. Earlier columns are here]

When I think of the graphic novels I have read – especially the ones with dark subject matter – it sometimes happens that a single image, just one panel among hundreds, stands out and seems to represent the tone of the whole. For instance, in Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde’s Mumbai Confidential, a noir thriller set in Mumbai’s underworld, this image would probably be the wordless “aerial shot” of two people – one of them a sweet little girl selling flowers – sprawled on the sidewalk on a gloomy night, after having been hit by a car. In Gautam Bhatia’s angry satire Lies: A Traditional Tale of Modern India, it might be the deliberately exaggerated drawing of a luxury plane that contains a swimming pool, a golf course and a shopping arcade, among other diversions. (The plane is being used by a minister who is flying over a drought-stricken area and making obligatory sympathetic noises. Poor man. Imagine having to make do with a six-hole mini-course.)

It would be hard to perform a similar exercise for Art Spiegelman’s magnificent memoir Maus, which was written as an attempt to record his parents’ experiences in the Nazi concentration camps – this is too multilayered a work to be reduced to one emblematic image. But there is a panel I noticed on a recent rereading, which reminded me of how closely sadness and humour, despair and affirmation run together in this story about human endurance in extreme situations.

The drawing shows Art’s father Vladek, having been incarcerated in a ghetto with his family and waiting to be taken to Auschwitz, coming across the dead body of the Jew who had turned informer and betrayed the Spiegelmans to the Nazis a few weeks earlier. “Hey!” Vladek tells a passerby, “This is the rat that turned my family over to the Gestapo.” It turns out that the informer had been shot after he was no longer of use to the Germans, and now Vladek is the one who ironically has the job of giving him a decent burial.

This situation in itself is a testament to shared suffering and how easily oppressors can become victims and vice versa, but the image might also make you laugh out loud, because it includes a little wink at the book’s chief stylistic device. Throughout Maus, Art Spiegelman depicts the Jews as wide-eyed mice and their German persecutors as smug, predatory cats. And so, in this panel, we have the use of the word “rat” to describe the dead man even as the drawing itself portrays both Vladek and the corpse as rodents. When people extol the virtues of the written word (text-only literature) over visual forms such as cinema or the illustrated book, it is often pointed out that great writing enables you to use your imagination, while visual depictions make it too easy. There is some truth in this, but I’m not sure how text alone – even when created by a very skilled writer – would be able to replicate the effect of this one drawing (which, as mentioned earlier, is among dozens of searing images in Maus).

The really dark graphic novels can be unflinchingly gruesome in what they do show, but they might equally achieve their effects through the power of suggestion – as the Japanese master Osamu Tezuka repeatedly does in his medical thriller Ode to Kirihito. One of the most devastating scenes here concerns the fate of a young woman named Reika, who plays the part of a “human tempura” in a crowd-drawing show involving a large vat of oil, but there is so much else to shudder at and sympathise with in this manga epic. Ode to Kirihito, is about a disease that is transforming people into dog-like beasts in 1970s Japan – the protagonist Dr Kirihito, who has been afflicted, lives in the countryside, trying to cure himself and others; meanwhile, in sophisticated city hospitals, doctors take part in corporate power struggles. In Tezuka’s hands, this premise becomes a way of exploring exactly what words like “humanity” and “morality” mean (something he achieved in a different way in what is perhaps his best known work, an eight-volume rendition of the Buddha’s life).

Some people find it hard to come to terms with sexual explicitness in illustrated books – not least because “comics” often get dumped in the children’s sections of bookstores – but there have been works, ranging from Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries to Chester Brown’s Paying for It, which do this exceedingly well, concealing subversive content beneath minimalist, placid-looking drawings. Satrapi’s story centres on teatime conversations between a group of Iranian women, who use this private time to air their troubles and use humour as therapy, and the talk progresses from relatively innocuous matters to the need to fake virginity for one’s husband if necessary. Brown’s book, set in a very different society and from a male perspective, is about his years of experience as a “john” – someone who regularly pays for sex with prostitutes – and the glimpse he got into the inner lives of these women, as well as the less savoury side of his own personality. It veers between personal epiphany and philosophical musings about love, commitment, power and control, and includes a series of endnotes where he discusses the ethics of prostitution.

It would be hard to imagine a non-pornographic film being made out of Paying for It, but one of the most gripping graphic novel-inspired films is David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, about a man named Joey who escapes a life of violence to live a quiet existence as a Regular Family Guy in a small town – and then finds his past pursuing him to the degree that his own wife and children no longer know who he really is. John Wagner and Vince Locke’s book, which the film is adapted from, can be viewed as pure pulp – it lacks the finesse of works by Spiegelman or Satrapi – but in its scratchy, black-and-white drawings there is a raw, menacing quality that fits the subject matter perfectly – not least in the hard-to-look-at scenes near the end where Joey, having returned to confront his enemies after 20 years, finds that his childhood friend Ricky had been kept imprisoned and savagely tortured for all that time, while Joey had been peacefully leading his new life hundreds of miles away.

When he stares at the battered, maimed body of his friend, Joey is in a sense looking at a distorting mirror that shows what he might have easily been if things had turned out just a bit differently. In my mind, there is an odd but resonant link between this image and the Maus one of Vladek Spiegelman gazing down at the body of the comrade who had betrayed him.

[For thoughts on another dark vision from a great graphic novel, see this post. And a long post about Chester Brown's Paying for It is here]

At the Times of India lit-fests: Hrishi-da's Heroines + Cinema as Reflector of Change

If you’re based in Delhi or Mumbai (or there at the right time), do mark these dates please. I’ll be participating in the Times of India’s literature festivals in those cities - first, on November 29 at the Oberoi Maidens, Delhi, I will be on a session titled “Cinema as Agent and Reflector of Change” with writers Gautam Chintamani, Maithili Rao, Fahad Samar and Srijana Mitra Das.

Then, on December 4 at the vast Mehboob Studio in Bandra, the Mumbai fest is hosting a session about women in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s cinema. The fabulous Pragya Tiwari will be moderating (something I am very pleased about since an essay commissioned by Pragya in 2012 was in some ways the genesis of the Hrishikesh Mukherjee book), and I have been told that Jaya Bachchan has confirmed her participation for the discussion, with Deepti Naval having tentatively confirmed.

Full schedules for both fests are here: Delhi and Mumbai. Do pass the word on.

‘Is this real?’ Pictures that lie, frames that mislead

[My latest Mint Lounge column]

I’m looking at a colourful coaster I picked up from a shop that specialises in kitschy Bollywood memorabilia on cushion covers and other household things. At first glance the image on the coaster seems to be a black-and-white movie still featuring two old-time actors – but if you know who the people are, a warning bell goes off, and then you take a closer look and see that two separate photos have been fit together to show the young, Elvis-like Shammi Kapoor of the 1960s apparently posing next to the Reena Roy of the 70s or 80s.

You’ll find other unusual juxtapositions in that nostalgia shop, other pairings that don’t meet the demands of real-world logic (though they can certainly give one’s imagination a workout). Which isn’t a surprise: we live in a photoshopped world, there are plenty of doctored photos doing the rounds (yes, like that selfie you just took in your bathroom and Instagrammed to make yourself look like Hrithik Roshan racing a horse in Krrish), and there are also authentic photos put to misleading use. A recent Facebook meme had a publicity still of Salman Khan and Sonam Kapoor in Prem Ratan Dhan Paayo placed next to another picture of Salman with a little girl who, the context made clear, was supposed to be Sonam as a child. This was intended as commentary on the Bollywood parampara of aging male stars romancing multiple generations of women onscreen. But though the point is valid, this particular image was a lie – that wasn’t Sonam in the second picture. And this should have been obvious: Salman didn’t look anything like the lithe, almost wispy Salman of 20 years ago.

(While I’m at it – no, that little boy you saw with Rabindranath Tagore in another widely circulated and gasped-over photograph wasn’t really the 10-year-old Satyajit Ray.)

As a result, some of us are always sceptical. “Is this real?” a friend asked suspiciously when he saw a photo of Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton together in what looked like a dressing room. Well, it was: the image was from the shoot of Limelight in which the two legends famously appeared together. But the question was understandable.

If still photos can’t be trusted, why should it be any different for moving images? In cinema’s early days, there was a notion that film couldn’t be an art form because the camera could do no more than drily record the real world. This was about cold mechanics, not creativity: how could a series of moving photographs represent a specific worldview, an individual’s distinct perspective (which is the bedrock of art)?

You’d think that idea would have faded by the 1920s, when great directors around the world – Chaplin, FW Murnau, Victor Sjöström and others – were expressing themselves through their work, making personal decisions about how to position a camera, where to use a match-cut or a high angle; and all this in addition to the less “technical” decisions, such as choice of story and actors. But as VF Perkins notes in his excellent book Film as Film, as late as 1947 a critic for the British newspaper Observer sniffed, “It is not within the power of electrical engineering to create. It can only reproduce.”

Notwithstanding those early critics, the medium’s leading exponents have always known that the camera was more than an unblinking mechanical eye. So many movies by celebrated directors such as Hitchcock are explicitly about distorted perceptions, about how our eyes can deceive us. Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 Blow-Up centres on a photographer thinking he has seen a dead body – yet, even when we view close-ups of the processed image, we might wonder: is that really the outline of a face, or is our mind creating patterns? And why, at the film’s end, do we hear the sound of a tennis ball being knocked back and forth when the ball itself is invisible?

Even documentaries can be constructs: one of the most hallowed, Robert Flaherty’s 1922 Nanook of the North, purported to be an authentic depiction of the Arctic Inuit, but built a half-igloo as the set for Nanook’s home; the interior of a real igloo didn’t have sufficient light for the camera.

And now technology has made all sorts of things possible. “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” the comedian Chico Marx deadpanned in Duck Soup. As always, the Marx Brothers were ahead of their time: in the CGI age, who would be silly enough to trust the evidence of their eyes? Watch Lord of the Rings and you don’t know where real-world New Zealand ends and graphic design begins. Watch Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 3 or Aishwarya Rai in Robot and you wonder if maybe they built an android that was good enough to pass off – just about – as human.

I’m not dissing trickery, though. There were some beautiful black-and-white photos doing the rounds of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean together, looking gorgeous, languidly smoking cigarettes on a balcony in the mid-50s. Those were fabricated, but you can’t blame a movie-buff for feeling that “reality” be damned, such a meeting and such a shoot should have happened. To paraphrase a famous line from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the legend is more appealing than the facts, print the legend.”

"The magic of Smita-ness" - a book about Smita Patil

[Did a version of this review for Open magazine]

One of the most cutting things a reviewer can say about a personality-centred book is that it is hagiographical; that the author has chosen veneration over discernment. This charge is sometimes a little unfair though (and I may be saying this from a position of defensiveness, having just written a book about a film personality myself). It is one thing for a book to be deceitful or compromised – perhaps because it is an authorized, controlled biography, or because the writer has a hidden agenda – but when the foundation stones are honesty and seriousness of intent, why should someone writing about a favourite person be obliged to maintain a discreet distance? After all, the best reason to write a book is that you are driven to write it – passionate about the subject, more willing to devote years of your life to it than most other fans would be. Surely a truthful expression of that passion is preferable to sap-headed “objectivity”.

Which brings me to Maithili Rao’s intense, deeply felt tribute Smita Patil, whose subtitle “A Brief Incandescence” is not just an apt description of Patil’s much-too-short life and how brightly she shone in the time given to her, but may also prepare you for the sometimes florid writing in these pages.

Rao’s feelings are clear from the opening lines: “She was Indian cinema’s Everywoman. Her genius shone through in rendering the everywoman extraordinaire with a signature hypnotic allure, a depth charged with intensity that exploded into emotions on celluloid, grand and subtle, dramatic and nuanced all at once”. Some might think this effusive enough for one page, but a few lines down you find, among other descriptions, “haunting presence”, “finely sculpted face”, “wilful and generous mouth”, “voice vibrating with emotion”, “proud carriage of a born fighter”, "infinite inflections", "girlish trills of gaiety", and “tensile strength of steel balanced with the suppleness of a reed”.

I list these partly to caution those of you who get put off by this sort of prose, but also to tell the more open-minded among you to persevere regardless – because there are many good things in this book if you are interested in Patil and the cinema that she was such a vital part of. Speaking for myself, mild annoyance with some of the overwriting and the repeated descriptions of Patil’s bone structure gave way to a growing respect for the author’s Smita-adoration and a willingness to be swept along by it.

This isn’t a conventional biography, Rao says in her introduction. She does provide basic background information about the Pune girl who went to Mumbai in her teens, became a Marathi newsreader for Doordarshan in the early 1970s and then found her way into cinema (and into the moment of the Indian New Wave) via Arun Khopkar’s diploma short Teevra Madhyam, but the bulk of the book looks at Patil’s key films, their sociological impact, what her presence added to them, and the reservoirs in her personality that informed her performances. Through her own analyses and the observations of those who had known Patil, she dissects her strengths as a performer: stillness, intensity, instinct – the last of those being particularly important for someone who, unlike most of her peers, had never been to the FTII or studied acting formally.

Rao’s assertions that “there are more peaks [of great performances] in Smita’s extraordinary career than any comparable figure of that time”, or that she was “indubitably the pole star of parallel cinema”, are debatable – but they form the basis of the book’s longest chapter, “Smita Patil and her Dasavatars”, in which she closely examines such films as Shyam Benegal’s Bhumika and Manthan, Jabbar Patel’s Jait re Jait and Umbartha, Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth and Mrinal Sen’s Akaler Sandhane; the two chapters that follow deal with other movies, ranging from Ketan Mehta’s superb Bhavni Bhavai to Sagar Sarhadi’s clunker Haadsa. Around this point she also rips into the many low-grade mainstream films that Patil chose to do. The little boy in me, who had loved B Subhash’s Dance Dance when it came out, bristled a little at Rao’s dismissal of it, but then ceded her points. (Even at age 10, I think I had understood that the long-suffering sister and wife Smita played in that film was a cipher, her fate little more than a pretext for Mithun to flex both muscles and angst, and for Shakti Kapoor to make an uncharacteristic sacrifice in the climax.) Happily, she does also acknowledge some of Patil’s more notable mainstream work such as JP Dutta’s epic Ghulami, a film that might have been pitch perfect if Dharmendra had been 15 years younger when it was made. (He and Smita are cast as childhood friends!)

Though I haven’t followed Patil’s career anywhere near as closely as Rao has, and even when I didn’t remember details of all the films discussed here, there is much in these analyses to chew on and appreciate, or – as a professional nitpicker – to disagree with. For instance, the 1974 Charandas Chor is very far from “a minor film”, in my view – it deserves to be rediscovered as a jewel of the New Wave, one of our best theatre-to-film adaptations, and a view of Benegal and his cinematographer Govind Nihalani working near full steam; personally I rate it above Nishant, which Rao spends many pages discussing. That said, Nishant is a more important Smita Patil film, and a starting point in her soon-to-be celebrated rivalry with Shabana Azmi.

I also enjoyed the close readings of specific scenes, such as the controversial bathing sequence from Rabindra Dharmraj’s Chakra, which has been both celebrated as unflinchingly realistic and derided as “poverty porn”; as Rao points out, the truth probably lies somewhere in between. Speaking as a male, I should say here that I found Patil genuinely sexy in that scene, and I would have trouble with any reading that strictly compartmentalized it as “frank but not titillating”. Its effect can vary depending on who is looking at it and in what context. And it should be possible to make two opposing suggestions: that the director’s intentions may have been questionable, but that Patil still found a way, through the deploying of confident, assertive sexuality, to keep the balance of power tilted in her favour. As she often did in other situations, in other films.

*****

There is a raw, breathless urgency in much of Rao's writing. The prose is conversational and informal at times (“Smita had no prudish issues”) to the extent that she even uses half-sentences at times, or lapses into the present tense while describing an aspect of Patil’s personality (“There is an intriguing contrary streak in Smita”). At other times she slips into scholar mode and into the language of academia, as if by habit. Between the two extremes, I usually preferred the former mode, which provides a firsthand sense of how personal all this is to her.

Though she discusses such character traits as Patil’s bohemian directness and generosity of spirit, and her relationships with her sister Anita and with friends, Rao is discreet about some things. She doesn’t spend much time on Patil’s controversial relationship with the married Raj Babbar, because she never got to speak firsthand with either of them and didn’t want to rely on hearsay and speculation. There are anecdotes about other aspects of Patil’s life though, such as the one about her draping handloom sarees over her jeans before going on air as a newsreader. And generously, she shares her stage with other Smita fans near the end of the book: there are short, heartfelt pieces by writer Deepa Deosthalee and theatre actor Vaishali Chakravarty, reminders of how thoroughly movie stars can imprint themselves on our lives.

But coming back to those Dasavatars, and to Rao’s thesis that they outshine – in quantity and quality – the heights attained by most other actresses. “I would personally place her above [Nargis and Meena Kumari] because she was untouched by film-industry baggage of stereotypes, expectations and practiced feminine airs and graces they were asked to adopt,” she writes. Actually, I think this same assertion could be used to make exactly the opposite case; skilled actors who operate mostly in the idiom of commercial cinema can face serious challenges in locating truth within an often-synthetic framework.

In any case it is hard to make such comparative assessments given that most of Patil’s best work was done by age thirty. With more time, there may have been more peaks – but it is equally likely that there may have been a rapid decline, a larger proportion of bad choices, and a consequent paring down of her reputation. The “what if” question is inescapable.

And perhaps this is why the story in Rao’s book that I thought most poignant was the one about a letter Smita wrote to director Saeed Mirza after they made Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai? together. How deeply do you believe in your political ideology and how long will you adhere to it, she asked. There was no apparent context for this question, but there is an urgency to it, a possible lament for the ephemeral nature of all things: principles, strong emotions, life itself. In another anecdote involving Amitabh Bachchan and his Coolie accident, Rao implies that Smita had a sixth sense. Could she have had a premonition of her own fate, and about the future arcs of her colleagues, many of whom were once associated purely with a cinema of integrity but who learned a few things about compromise over the years? Looking at the young woman with the soulful eyes on this book’s cover, one is tempted to say yes.

[Some posts about other notable biographies of actors who died young: Lois Banner on Marilyn Monroe; Vinod Mehta on Meena Kumari]

On movie servants, then and now

[Did this piece for The Indian Express]

The recent film Talvar has often been described as an objective presentation of competing scenarios in the Aarushi Talwar murder case, but this is a bit misleading: the narrative that the film most clearly endorses is the one uncovered by CDI officer Ashwin (Irrfan Khan) about a drinking binge that got out of hand in the servants’ quarters. The scenes recreating this scenario would have sent a chill through many middle-class viewers, given the familiarity of the domestic arrangements and the potential danger contained in them: a lower-class man unrelated to the family, living in quarters within the flat; the blitheness, or blindness, of his employers, who barely registered him as a sentient presence and didn’t realise he might have friends over late at night; the possibility that these men might set their sights on the “baby” of the house.

But calling Talvar alarmist — a caution about a clash of cultures, a warning to the genteel “us” about the grubby “them” — would be too simple. Because in that same narrative, the main servant Khempal (a stand-in for the real-life Hemraj who worked for the Talwars) is depicted as a benevolent, avuncular man who does everything he can to protect the young girl (“Meri beti jaisi hai”). In that sense, Khempal isn’t so removed from a familiar archetype of the Hindi-movie servant, one that all of us can picture when we remember movies of the 1970s. It’s another thing that the Raghu chachas and Ramu kakas of a bygone time, ancient retainers, doddering about with their dusting rags, would never be seen in the vicinity of a bottle of rum or whisky.

Or wouldn’t they?

In Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s 1975 Mili, the tortured Shekhar (Amitabh Bachchan) shifts from one apartment to another, elderly manservant Gopi in tow, to escape his past; but since he finds no peace of mind, there is plenty of liquor-guzzling, and naturally Gopi is the one who brings out the flasks and bottles. The relationship between the two is sharply observed: Shekhar’s angry outbursts might be cringe-inducing, were it not for the fact that the old man gives back as good as he gets — while also serving as Shekhar’s protector against the intrusion of other people in the building. They are almost like squabbling spouses.

The more typical family retainer in films of the time was the genial, subservient old man in a joint-family setting — the one who would pick the children up from school, and generally keep the home fires burning. You could be sure of his decorum-ensuring presence — polishing some knickknack or other in the background, waiting for bitiya’s instructions to bring chai, if an unmarried boy and girl happened to meet at one of their homes with no other family member present. For all we know, he was born with that dusting cloth attached to his shoulder. And our broad memories of those scenes lend heft to the idea that such films (particularly the Middle Cinema, represented by the work of Mukherjee, Basu Chatterji and Gulzar) were “innocent” and of a “simpler” time: that such servants belonged to the Old India of clearly defined class roles, where such a person wasn’t expected to transcend the circumstances of his birth; that the New India of the past 20 years is a more egalitarian (therefore, more precarious) place where the lower-class man of the household might be a Laxmikant Berde on buddy-buddy terms with rich kid Salman Khan.

There is something to this view, but it can create a simplistic Then vs Now binary, while failing to recognise that things haven’t changed all that radically in our society, and that many of those old films were sharper than you think. Consider the celebrated character actor AK Hangal, who in the popular imagination is more associated with the generic family servant than any other actor is. In Basu Bhattacharya’s 1971 Anubhav, Hangal’s character operates well outside the cliché. In his mildly salacious opening scene, he comments wryly on current lifestyles, while apparently massaging Sanjeev Kumar’s buttocks. It’s two in the morning and Kumar’s character — a newspaper editor — is in bed, proofing reports. “Mujhe toh lagta hai ke aap logon ki duniya hee kuch ulti-pulti hai (God intended us to work during the day and sleep at night and here you are doing the opposite thing),” the old servant says with a disapproving head-shake. Later, he is a sounding board for the restless lady of the house, played by Tanuja; when he calls her “bahu”, this alienated child of the modern world feels like she belongs.

Anubhav was a formally experimental film — especially in its naturalistic sound design, overlapping dialogue and handheld-camera shots — that belonged more to the New Wave of the period than to narrative filmmaking. But even in films that looked much more conventional, sly things were done with the class divide and with the role of a servant as someone who could be a sutradhaar, a life-changer, a fount of wisdom or even a God-figure simply by virtue of being around all the time, managing the small but important things (it isn’t just chance that so many of these characters were named Raghu or Vishnu or Ram).

In a movie as frothy as Mukherjee’s Chupke Chupke, for instance, role-play is employed to show what might happen when class lines get blurred and a society’s safety nets fall away. “Driver insaan nahin hota?” asks Sulekha (Sharmila Tagore) when accused of getting a little too cosy with the family chauffeur; the fact that the “driver” is really Sulekha’s husband in disguise doesn’t nullify the larger resonance of this question, or the quiet, unshowy subversiveness of the film. (In another funny but pointed scene, a businessman looks directly at his childhood buddy but doesn’t recognise him, because the latter is wearing a driver’s uniform.) Meanwhile, the servant-as-bhagwaan idea had its clearest realisation in Bawarchi, where the title character, played by Rajesh Khanna, is strongly associated with the god Krishna: he emerges from a beautiful, misty setting (Vrindavan) and heads straight towards a house divided (Hastinapura) to set things right; in one dream sequence, he even plays saarthi or moral guide to the confused child of the house.

Hindi-movie servants didn’t have a good time of it in the 1980s, when they were usually embedded in a slapstick comedy track that ran alongside the main one; it is hard to say what social commentary may be found in all those scenes where Shakti Kapoor ran around in striped pajamas with his naara (drawstring) hanging out, or in the Johnny-Lever-channelling-Jerry-Lewis interludes. And later, in the world of the post-liberalisation “multiplex film”, people from what was once designated the Servant Class either became invisible — no joint families, no retainers — or were now the protagonists of stories about quick social climbing (or wanting desperately to climb), from Dibakar Banerjee’s Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! to Kanu Bahl’s Titli.

But even as our cinema becomes self-consciously progressive, breaking away from its past traditions, there is still space — even in urban stories — for the honest, well-written depiction of the old-school servant. One of this year’s best films, Shoojit Sircar’s Piku, has the cantankerous Bhaskor Banerjee (Amitabh Bachchan) in a love-hate relationship with his household help Bhudan. In a nod to Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s cinema, Bhaskor was named after the character Bachchan had played in Anand 45 years earlier. But his scenes with Bhudan may remind you of the Shekhar and Gopi of another Mukherjee film, jousting with each other across class lines, affection and impatience running hand in hand.

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[My book The World of Hrishikesh Mukherjee has a few more reflections on the class divide in films like Chupke Chupke, Aashirwad, Anari and Gol Maal]

Charles and his doubles

[My latest Mint Lounge column]

“He was everything larger than life that I had expected him to be (sic),” the actor Randeep Hooda said in an interview to a daily paper, “He was so full of life, almost virile. He is such a handsome man. Even at age 72, his aura is fully intact.”

By the time this gush-fest ends, the reader may have lost sight of the fact that the big incandescent blob of charisma being talked about – and the man Hooda plays in the new film Main aur Charles – is the serial killer Charles Sobhraj, who has spent over 30 years in jail (in separate stints) for his crimes.

But no, I’m being unfair to Hooda. An actor doesn’t have the luxury of being judgemental: he has to try and understand – even, to whatever degree possible, empathise with – the character he is playing. And Hooda is very good in Main aur Charles. The true scope of his performance and presence is felt gradually, as the film itself – directed with flair by Prawaal Raman, and wonderfully shot, often in dark shadowy settings, by Anuj Rakesh Dhawan – goes from being a disjointed (and puzzling) collection of vignettes to one where the narrative comes together more fully.

The real-life Sobhraj was a charmer, and this was integral to his success at doing the things he did; it’s unreasonable to expect a film to present him as unattractive just to make a moral point. (Whether it should go as far as putting the tagline “Worth Dying For” on the poster is another debate!) Speaking more generally though, film history is dotted with magnetic villains, and with the accompanying question: is it okay to make evil seem seductive?

The answer appears clearer in some cases than in others. When Adolf Hitler is depicted in godlike terms – descending from the clouds to greet his people and lead Germany to glory – in the 1935 documentary Triumph of the Will, it is relatively easy to say (with hindsight) that Leni Riefenstahl’s film was irresponsible, or even wicked. We wince at those images and turn for succor to films that threw a banana peel under the thick boots of fascism: the comical sight of Hitler as a megalomaniac playing with a balloon globe in The Great Dictator (1940), or the opening scene of To Be or Not to Be (1942), with the Fuhrer apparently window-shopping at a Warsaw market (and being gawked at in turn by spectators). And yet, even for a Triumph of the Will, there can be a counterview: what we are being shown is what the dispirited, messiah-starved German citizen of the time saw; in that sense, the film is being truthful to a specific perspective.

At other times, even when a bad-guy film has its heart in the right place, the casting may introduce a dimension that was not intended. In 1968, Tony Curtis played the notorious killer Albert DeSalvo in The Boston Strangler (a film that has minor structural similarities with Main aur Charles). He was deglamorized for the part, and it was a daring performance – but that didn’t completely take away from the fact that here was a Hollywood golden boy, a matinee idol who used to be associated with swashbucklers and romances. To a Curtis fan, might DeSalvo become easy to relate to on some level?

The dashing, blank-slate villain has quite a fan-following too. Anyone who has read Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels will see that Sobhraj – at least as depicted in Main aur Charles – is a cousin to Highsmith’s amoral anti-hero, who slips from one personality to another as he prepares his crimes. (Unsurprisingly, Ripley has had some gripping cinematic avatars, from Alain Delon in the 1960 Plein Soleil to Dennis Hopper in The American Friend and Matt Damon in The Talented Mr Ripley.) In fact, thinking about Charles and Ripley, I realised that the “Main” (me) in the simple-seeming title Main aur Charles doesn’t have to be police commissioner Amod Kanth (Adil Hussain), who is Charles’s nemesis and the story’s po-faced moral centre; the “me” could just as easily be a second, hidden Charles. At one point he is shown fake passports bearing his photographs and assumed names, and asked: which of these people are you? “All of them,” he replies tersely. But is there a real person beneath the disguises, or only one final blank mask?

Which brings us to the doppelganger theme, with its view of good and evil as inextricable sides of the same coin. In recent popular culture, the idea has been iconised in some of the darker comics about the Batman-Joker relationship (see Alan Moore’s brilliant Batman: The Killing Joke, with its closing yarn about two lunatics trying to escape an asylum together) and you’ll also find it in the relationship between gentleman cannibal Hannibal Lecter and his pursuer Will Graham. “The reason you caught me is that we are just alike,” says Lecter to the spooked Will in the 1986 film Manhunter, a theme that has been more fully developed in the ongoing TV series Hannibal.

In fact, the title of Raman’s film reminded me of the two Charlies in one of the best doppelganger movies I have seen, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 Shadow of a Doubt: in one corner is the lady-killer (in both senses of the term) Uncle Charlie, in the other is his adoring small-town niece, who was named after him. Often linked together visually by the film, they have a near-telepathic connection – the difference being that the younger Charlie is uncorrupted, while the older one is a murderer and a nihilist.

In the end he is tossed off a train; good triumphs over evil. But it isn’t that simple either. We are left with a clear sense that the once-innocent world of the younger Charlie has been forever altered. It’s a bit like the spooky scene in Main aur Charles where Amod Kanth’s wife, having become intrigued by the Charles story, tells her husband “He was involved with dozens of women, and you can’t even handle me alone?” and the otherwise straight-arrow cop looks at her and bursts into a convulsion of laughter, his eyes gleaming like those of the man he is pursuing to the ends of the earth.